Leitch likes the flexibility of this non-subscription approach. Photograph: AlexeyPelikh/Getty Images/iStockphoto You can reduce upfront prices by subscribing to a particular collection of audiobooks. For example, if you buy more than 20 titles, your subsequent purchases that year will be £3.99 each. Instead, loyalty is rewarded: while titles never cost more than £7.99 at this retailer, the more you buy, the less you will pay for the rest of that year. Xigxag, by contrast, doesn’t operate a subscription model. Both allow a single credit to be used to buy expensive £24.99 audiobooks such as Where the Crawdads Sing, so subscribers effectively pay a third of the price charged to non-subscribers. Kobo charges less: £6.99 a month, again for one credit, which you can redeem against any of the titles in its catalogue. Audible members receive one credit each month in exchange for a monthly £7.99 subscription.
You can dramatically reduce most of these upfront prices by subscribing to a particular collection, however, and buying the book with a “credit”. To give an example of how prices can differ, at the time of writing, the audiobook of the bestselling novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was £24.99 on Audible, £24.99 on Kobo, £24.90 on Spotify, £9.99 on Apple Books, and £7.99 on xigxag. However, the savings on individual books at xigxag can be significant.
Of those four, and indeed across all the commercial audiobook services we looked at, xigxag consistently offered the most significant savings and charged the lowest average price: £7.68 a book.Īpple Books was close behind, charging £8.81 a book on average. However, most titles – more than 80% – were also available to buy from Apple Books (98%), Kobo (92%), Spotify (90%) and xigxag (84%). Only Audible offered access to 100% of the 50 titles we chose, for an average upfront cost of £16.57 a book to non-subscribers. We randomly chose 50 different audiobooks – 10 classic novels, 10 nonfiction books and the rest a mixture of popular bestsellers and literary fiction – and checked to see which titles were available where, and how much they would cost. Guardian Money put 15 different audiobook collections to the test: Audible, Apple Books,, BBC Sounds, BookBeat, BorrowBox, Kobo, LibriVox, Listening Books, OverDrive, Scribd, Spiracle, Spotify, uLibrary and xigxag. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Our main findings Audible has dominated the UK audiobook market for years but there are plenty of other options.
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